"Avatar: Fire and Ash"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

I walked into Avatar: Fire and Ash as a tired, jaded adult and walked out a 10-year-old kid, having spent three hours staring at a giant screen, watching impossible scenes with rapt attention, gasping at unexpected plot twists, and bursting into spontaneous applause when the good guys won the day.

Which isn't to say that the good guys decisively win the day in James Cameron's third Avatar movie, but in the unlikely event that this proves to be the final Avatar film, let it be said it ends on a satisfyingly high note. It reminded me of the ending of Return of the Jedi, in which the story seems to come to a conclusion, though you know in your heart of hearts that can't be possible.

There are many things in Avatar: Fire and Ash that can't be possible, and the staggering vision of Cameron and his team of performers, designers, animators, artists and technicians of every type makes them all feel real. Your brain knows that what you're watching has been generated with the help of very powerful computers, but Avatar: Fire and Ash is the apotheosis of what movies have been doing from the very beginning: convincing us that what we're seeing up there on the screen is happening as we watch.

If the first Avatar in 2009 became the most successful movie of all time because of its novelty, and 2022's Avatar: The Way of Water simply drew people back for another look — which is what some cynical minds will try to get you to believe — then Avatar: Fire and Ash really has its work cut out for it. This movie can no longer succeed or fail based solely on technological prowess, it has to win its audience over the old-fashioned way, through story, characters and emotion.

It works. Does it ever.

If Avatar: Fire and Ash has a primary fault it's not that it's running time of 3 hours, 15 minutes, is too long, it's that it might be too short — that there are moments that feel rushed, sometimes even choppy, when the movie is trying to pack too many of its multiple storylines into too little screen time. There's probably a version of Avatar: Fire and Ash that could be split into two "regular-sized" movies, and I'd like to see that version. After this movie, I'd like to see any new Avatar adventure.

In recent years, it seems Avatar has divided moviegoers along essentially the same lines as religion: You either believe in these films wholly, you don't believe in them at all, or you're an agnostic who sits somewhere in the middle, willing to watch if the opportunity presents itself. Avatar: Fire and Ash will do nothing to convert the non-believers, and will more than satisfy the true believers. And those in the middle? Who may have seen an Avatar film but don't take a strong stance one way or another? I'll wager this film will convert them into the faithful.

Avatar: Fire and Ash is narrated by Lo'ak, son of Jake Sully, the former Marine who, after seeing what armed forces were doing to the mesmerizing planet of Pandora in the name of corporate colonization made a choice to trade in his "avatar" of the 10-foot-tall, golden-eyed humanoids and become a Na'vi (native Pandoran) himself. The choice made rather bad enemies out of Col. Miles Quarritch and the Resources Development Administration, which has a goal of exploiting every possible part of Pandora.

Sully led a successful assault against RDA forces in the first film, but like the Empire in Star Wars or Voldemort in Harry Potter, the RDA just won't stop. There are billions and billions to be made off of the miracles in Pandora. Having fled their forest home in the first film, Jake and his Na'vi wife Neytiri and their children fled in the second film, The Way of Water, to a place that seemed safe from the RDA. But it turned out RDA also wanted to harvest Tulkan, or Pandoran whales, for a substance they secrete.

They'd stop at nothing to get it, and Sully will stop at nothing to stop the RDA, and with that core conflict Cameron has set up something like Luke against the Empire in the Star Wars movies. To some degree, it's always going to be the same story, over and over.

But to a larger degree, this is a vast and complicated world Cameron has created, and it presents extraordinary opportunities for storytelling. In Fire and Ash, Quarritch (now inhabiting a Pandoran body himself) crosses paths with the Mangkwan Clan, or "Ash People," native Pandorans who reject the ecology-based philosophies of oneness with nature that the Na'vi worship. The Ash People are led by the dangerous and power-hungry Varang, who agrees to join forces with Quarritch to bring Sully — a terrorist traitor to the human cause, according to the RDA — to justice. And, by so doing, to rule over the many clans of Pandora.

It's a simple story, rendered complex by multiple storylines, each with enough to power their own films. Jake's daughter Kiri is growing more connected to the planet and to Ewa, the spiritual entity who guides all living things. Lo'ak is testing out his own independence in a very big way. Adopted son Spider — who, it turns out, is actually Quarritch's son — begins coming into his own in surprising fashion, while Jake's wife Neytiri is none too pleased with the fight against the RDA that has left her and her family exiled from their forest home.

And this is just the barest outline of a story that at times plays out on three or four different stages all at once, with sure-handed editing never keeping one away for long. It all leads up to one spectacular battle, which in turn leads to another spectacular battle and, let's face it, spectacular battles are one of the biggest reasons we're here. Avatar: Fire and Ash delivers on that front ... and then some.

At its core, the movie never loses sight of its central questions regarding colonization and exploitation of natural resources. It's an environmental movie though and through, pro-ecology, anti-pollution, anti-military, virulenty anti-colonialist. But it's as much a political movie as Star Wars or Star Trek ever was: that is, the messages are there if you want to take them, and if not it's just a hell of a good time.

From visuals to story to acting to music and intensity, Avatar: Fire and Ash outshines its very strong predecessors. This is a movie to give yourself over to — and most people will. It will reward them. It's a dazzling, crowd-pleasing movie, the kind of afternoon or evening at the theater that has you sitting at attention (yes, on the edge of your seat), gripping the arm of the person you came with or ripping up napkins as you watch. Cameron is a master of cross-cutting, of telling multiple stories at once and making sure (mostly) that we're never confused where we are. Avatar: Fire and Ash has so many balls in the air by the time its climax rolls around that it's almost unbelievable none of them get dropped — cinematically speaking, Cameron is one hell of a juggler.

At times, though, scenes seem to be cut too soon, a few moments seem unclear and never fully explained, and the action can, in a few moments, seem a little disjointed. It's hard to imagine it being any other way — this movie is truly overstuffed with ideas and plot points, so it's no surprise a few don't line up. But that's such a minor quibble about a film that is as good a time at the cinema as movies can be.

To my mind, it's the best of the Avatar films so far, even if it lacks the novelty of the first. No appeal has worn off, but Avatar has settled into its world and its story in the best possible way. At least, if you ask me. Like I said, I've become one of the faithful. I believe in these movies, and I don't care who knows it. But if you aren't one of those people, prepare to come away nonplussed — Avatar: Fire and Ash is, in some ways, more of the same. Gloriously so. We return to the world of Pandora to be astounded, to be excited, and sometimes (with increasing frequency) to be genuinely moved. Or, in my case, to feel like a kid again.

On all those counts, Avatar: Fire and Ash succeeds ... spectacularly.

Viewed December 20, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1800

Favorite Films: "Something Wicked This Way Comes"

As I write this, it's coming up on Christmas, and the ubiquitous A Christmas Story has begun appearing. It's no longer limited to a 24-hour Christmas Eve marathon on TCM; no, it's possible to watch A Christmas Story any time of day, any day of the week, on an endless loop if desired.

The seemingly unlimited appeal of A Christmas Story can be found, not surprisingly, in its nostalgia, in its remembrance (for those of an advanced age) and yearning (for everyone else) of a time in which life moved more slowly, more simply, when simply wishing for something could change your life, and when a boy realized his father was more than an old man, but a complex, living human being with dreams both big and small.

A Christmas Story was released at the tail end of 1983, and was a box-office failure on its release, garnering mixed reviews and little attendance. It vanished from theaters, only to somehow be resuscitated by VHS and, most of all, by those TCM showings.

About six months before A Christmas Story, another movie hit theaters. It was also the tale of a young boy living in Depression-era middle America. It told of his wishing to be older, of his small-town friendships, of his discovery of a man who could make his wishes come true, and of his realization that his father had dashed dreams, both big and small.

But it took place at Halloween, not at Christmas (though was dumped into theaters in April, the cruellest month for movies), and came not from a humorist and a director of crass sex comedies, but from a wildly successful novelist and the director of one of the most unnerving of all black-and-white horror films. And it came from Disney, a company that was then near the nadir of its existence.

Something Wicked This Way Comes was, for Disney, a bold experiment, a wildly expensive adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel, which Gene Kelly, of all people, had tried for years and years to get made. When he finally gave up, the rights were snatched up by Disney, which hadn't learned its lessons on the expensive flops of The Black Hole or Tron, or from its other foray into horror, a massive flop called The Watcher in the Woods. But Disney was undaunted. It wanted to produce movies that could succeed with young audiences who had been lately flocking to Friday the 13th and Halloween movies.

What better, then, than a nostalgic, wistful movie about two young boys whose biggest curse word is "hell" and who live in an autumnal-colored small-town world? There's nothing about Something Wicked This Way Comes that is, in any way, like a horror movie. The script, by Bradbury himself, revels in flowery prose, that doesn't come close to the way people talk, and as director Disney chose Jack Clayton, whose movie The Innocents starring Deborah Kerr is both claustrophobic and scary but also intellectual and distant.

After spending $20 million, enduring endless reshoots, and adding, at the last second, a score by James Horner, who was still making his name in Hollywood, Disney had no idea what to do with the movie.

They still don't. It only just appeared on Disney+ a couple of months ago, where it sits uncomfortably next to Alien movies, American Horror Story and The Omen. Anyone stumbling on it will be perplexed because Something Wicked This Way Comes is not a scary movie. It's not a horror film. It's a gentle, tenderhearted movie about growing up and having regrets and learning how to love the people in your life despite all their faults. It's a movie about the sad and secret ways the heart will always yearn for the way life used to be, and how easy it is to be tempted into thinking that maybe, just one more time, it can be that way again.

Those temptations are made real by Mr. Dark, the proprietor of a mysterious, clearly sinister carnival that comes to a place called Green Town in the middle of an October night, long past the time of year that carnivals should appear. Mr. Dark is played by Jonathan Pryce, in one of his best roles ever — he's hypnotic and seductive and filled with darkness in his soul.

Mr. Dark and his carnival, it turns out, are the Autumn People — dark creatures who feed on the pain and torment of average people. It is how they live. They are emotional vampires, sucking the sadness and regret out of everyday lives, leaving behind nothing but a soulless creature who, for just one brief moment, gets to experience everything they ever desired.

Young Jim Nightshade (played by Shawn Carson) and Will Holloway (Vidal Peterson) find the carnival. Jim is entranced. Will is scared. But both have a hard time staying away. Will fears the carnival, because he knows of no one more filled with regret than his father, played by Jason Robards, whose presence lends the film a necessary weight.

Ultimately, there's a showdown — two, really. One is an extraordinary scene between Mr. Dark and Mr. Holloway, in which Dark tries his best to tempt the man with the promise of youth. The second is a more straightforward one, in which the boys and the father confront the demons at the carnival. It's filled with smoke and pyrotechnics and visual effects that are all wrong for the movie.

The pacing throughout most of Something Wicked This Way Comes is often off, probably a result of Bradbury's own attempt to keep the core of his novel. His script retains too much kindness, too much gentleness, and it is tempting to wonder what might have happened if someone else had written the film. Often disjointed, featuring performers like Diane Ladd, Pam Grier and Royal Dano in roles that are barely even there, Something Wicked This Way Comes will lose a lot of viewers because it's too sweet, too quiet, too wistful.

But isn't that what nostalgia is? We remember the past with the softest of filters because we focus on the moments that shaped us. Something Wicked This Way Comes, which has one of Horner's very best scores, remembers a time of innocence, a time when the sweetness of youth turned momentarily sour ... but became sugary again both by vanquishing evil and by the mere passage of time.

It is the kind of film that grows better with every viewing, or maybe it just grows better because with every viewing we're that much older, that much more weighed down by life, that much more willing to wonder what it would take for us to resist the kind of temptation presented in the story ... and if we would really have been the kind of children who would have seen evil for what it was, stared it down, and chosen our families over all the other tantalizing possibilities Mr. Dark and the world could offer. 

December 18, 2025

"Wake Up Dead Man"

☆☆☆☆

Peter Falk did it every few weeks for years. Angela Lansbury did it every Sunday night for a decade. Agatha Christie did it 75 times in 55 years.

Solving murders is so entertaining it can be done over and over with virtually no loss of enjoyment, and now the same can be said for Rian Johnson, writer and director of mysteries featuring the flamboyant, drawling, Southern detective Benoit Blanc.

Netflix, which produces the movies and deigns to release them in a handful of theaters in a shameless quest for Oscars (one that in a way undermines the very concept of theatrical releases, which they claim to be supporting), has decided not to call these "Benoit Blanc Mysteries," but "Knives Out Mysteries," named for the 2019 film that introduced Blanc as the greatest (living) detective in the world.

So, let it be known that except for Blanc's presence, there's nothing at all to connect the latest film, Wake Up Dead Man, with the first or with Glass Onion, the second and, to my mind, best of the films. In Knives Out, Johnson and star Daniel Craig ("He's James Bond!") were trying to get a handle on Blanc, and this time around they're working in what's now familiar territory, but Glass Onion is the one in which Blanc first came fully alive. It's also got the most energy, though that doesn't mean Wake Up Dead Man is any sort of a slouch.

It's a fulfilling mystery, a terrifically well-made film, an entertaining lark, and, in the style of the lush 1970s adaptations of Christie's novels (like Murder on the Orient Express and Death On the Nile), it's an opportunity to see lots of familiar actors in roles that range from scenery-chewing to throwaway.

Like every movie, in my mind, it's best experienced in a movie theater, but at home you'll be able to shout out, "Is that ... ?" when a new face appears, and remind yourself where you've seen them before. It's nice to know, in a way, that even in today's more blockbuster-driven Hollywood, there are still modern equivalents of, say, Jack Warden, Olivia Hussey and Roddy McDowall.

Wake Up Dead Man stars Josh O'Connor ("He's in everything!") as a young priest named Jud Duplenticy, whose last name doesn't sound like "duplicity" for no reason. He's a committed man of the cloth, but a foul-mouthed former street fighter, too, and the church doesn't know what to do with him. They send him to upstate New York (curiously, the movie is set in the U.S. but feels in every other regard like a story about a proper murder in a small British countryside town), where he's placed at Our Lady of Perpetual Fortitude, a parish ruled with an iron fist by Monsignor Wicks ("He's in all those Westerns!"). He, in turn, is ruled by the church's similarly iron-fisted manager Martha Delacroix ("Oh, wow, Glenn Close!").

Though they're arguably the film's biggest stars, the church is filled with loyal parishioners, and they are each a suspect, potential red herring and reasonably well known movie or TV star. You may not recognize them all, but in a movie like this, part of the fun is thinking, "Where do I know them from?" There's the one from that TV show, the other one from that TV show, the one from the movie about wine ...

Monsignor Wicks is the unfortunate victim in Wake Up Dead Man, and writer-director Johnson is both a huge fan of murder-mysteries and clearly an expert designer of them, too, so it would take a second or third viewing to be sure, even after it's all solved, if you saw everything and got all the clues you needed. I haven't watched it again, but if the lavish '70s Christie movies are any indication, everything is there on screen, right in front of you, but the beauty of these kinds of movies is that you can't see what you don't realize you're looking for.

Local police, led by Mila Kunis ("That's who it is!"), call in Blanc, who is more than a little excited by what appears to be an impossible murder. The movie spends a great deal of time — it's nearly two and a half hours long — setting it all up, and adding in some genuine surprises and twists that seem as impossible as the murder itself.

Craig has another blast playing Blanc, O'Connor is effectively nonplussed when all fingers seem to be pointing at poor Father Jud, and the film maintains Johnson's unique sense of humor, even if it's not as flat-out funny as either Knives Out or Glass Onion.

It's just a good time at the movies. Or, if you will, on the sofa in front of the TV, which is hardly as exciting. But it's still much more than passable entertainment — it's devilishly fun.

Viewed December 13, 2025 — Alamo Drafthouse LA

1830

"Train Dreams"

☆☆☆☆☆

Robert Grainier doesn't know who he is. He has no birthday, no parents, no hometown. He has only himself. Most of us aren't like Grainier, the main character in director Clint Bentley's achingly beautiful, exquisite rumination on life, but just because we know our birthday, our parents, our life story doesn't mean we have all that much more than Grainier.

He's a logger in the Pacific Northwest, a man who lives for work, or works to live, much like the rest of us, though his work is on the railway, which is making its way through the wilderness of Washington state in the early 1900s.

Grainier, played by Joel Edgerton with quiet intensity, doesn't know what he wants from life. He's not even sure what he's supposed to want, until he meets Gladys (Felicity Jones) at church one day. They share a vision of what their life together could be, and then they set about to build it — it's not grand, but it's theirs, including a daughter named Kate. For a while, Grainier achieves a happy sort of satisfaction, heading back out for a new job, which is filled with dangers and insights into the vicissitudes of human beings and the world in which they try to make their way.

Life, though, does not go the way Grainier expects it will. Train Dreams follows him on a journey through life that seems, perhaps, small and unimportant, though thanks to stunning cinematography by Adlopho Veloso and a beautiful score by Bryce Dessner, it is in its way a grand and epic life. Grainier would never think it so, but that's one of the things I think Train Dreams is trying to say: We cannot see our lives for what they are, and we cannot see where we fit in the world.

Much later in his life, Grainier meets a woman named Claire (Kerry Condon), who is a forest service worker in the years after World War II. From her perch high above the woods, they look at the land and Claire reminds him that everything serves a purpose. At a distance, it's hard to tell where one thing ends and another begins, and it's clear that even the invisible insects play a role.

It turns out Claire has her own tale to tell. Everyone in Train Dreams does. You can see it in their eyes, hear it in their weary but hopeful voices. But this is one man's story, and by the time he is up there in that lookout tower, he has been beaten down and forgotten what — if anything — he ever wanted to be or achieve.

"The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as it needs a preacher in the pulpit," Claire assures him. Is he heartened by her words? It's hard to tell. But Edgerton's soulful, deeply etched face make it clear they haven't got unheard. Later, much later, Grainier finds something like solace.

It takes a long time to get there — the movie covers a span of nearly 50 years, a half-century in which everything changes, not just for Grainier but in the world at large. This quiet, deliberate drama may seem to some to take nearly the same length of time to play out. It's a slow movie, but never boring; it's quiet, but every frame has something to say.

Train Dreams, like far too many movies these days, deserves, even demands, to be seen on the big screen, not just to appreciate its beauty, but to experience its pace. Most people will find it on Netflix, where they'll be able to pause, stop, restart and rewind it, all of which have their advantages, no doubt, but all of which will destroy the careful craft with which Bentley has made this film.

For those who watch it as intended — all at once, carefully — Train Dreams offers a rare kind of emotional intelligence too often missing in movies, which lead it to a final scene that feels perfect, aided by evocative narration from Will Patton. That last moment, in turn, leads to an end-credits song by the singular Nick Cave* that will leave you soaring, sobbing or, most likely, a little of both.

---

* Oh, God — it just hit me what the damnable autoplay feature in Netflix will do to these credits, and how Netflix will ruin one of the most sublime moments I've had in movies all year. Train Dreams deserves a fate far, far better than being yet another piece of "content" on the streaming service.

Viewed December 11, 2025 — Motion Picture & Television Fund

1400

"Wicked: For Good"

 ☆☆☆

Now, wait just a clock tick.

On Broadway, Wicked runs 2 hours, 30 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. On film, Wicked: Part 1 and Wicked: For Good together run two minutes shy of five hours. And despite finding much to enjoy about the first movie, now that I've seen the second, the big question the two films together leave behind is simply: Why?

It was easy to forgive the first movie its excesses, at least watching it the first time. Like many admirers of the Broadway spectacle on which it's based, the film version had been two decades coming, and it was a thrill to see Elphaba and G(a)linda brought to life by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. But on an at-home rewatch, the movie lost its lightness, and labored under all that had been added to it.

The swirling CGI shots of Oz, the dizzying and impossible camerawork made possible by visual effects, the expansive scenery, the elongated musical sequences all overwhelmed the story and even the performances. Even last year, I had been worried about Part 2 of Wicked, and there was good reason to be.

The director, John M. Chu, is fond of excess in everything, and has turned the 60-minute second act of Wicked into 138 minutes of grandiosity. Everything in Wicked: For Good (a nonsensical title, since the first movie was simply subtitled Part 1) is big, big, big. Big. Very big. Except the emotions.

And this is the crux of the problem with the Wicked sequel — instead of focusing on the internal struggles of its two main characters, instead of watching them grapple with the unintended and enormously problematic consequences of the choices they made in the first part, the film version of Wicked piles story point upon story point upon story point, adding in massive visual effects sequences (including a specific visual reference to 1939's The Wizard of Oz that is super-brief and super-clever), until Elphaba and Glinda are almost buried.

On stage, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is a black-draped performer being lifted on a hidden cherry picker. It's low-tech, but boy does it work. On screen, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is, well, all of them. They're all high-tech, and very few of them work. They take us out of the story, they revel in their excess, and they suffocate what on stage becomes a surprisingly intimate exploration of the two character searching their souls to justify their actions.

What should move snappily plods along, with two shockingly bland — and also unnecessary — new songs that add nothing to the story but pad out the running time even further. The emotional beats rarely land, in part because they're staged so awkwardly. When Elphaba sings to her lover about her feelings as they lay together in post-coital bliss, the film chooses to have her walking anxiously away from him before they've even touched each other ... even though the lyrics are about their physical proximity.

Because the movie spends so much time away from Elphaba and Glinda, it also makes some of the stage musical's weakest points even weaker. On stage, the integration of the original Wizard of Oz characters is clunky and rather non-sensical (why would the Scarecrow, knowing now who he actually is, at least in this story, join the little Kansas girl on the mission to kill that particular witch?). The movie's production design recalls a lot of the 1939 film, but then ignores both that movie and the original story by having Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, after all) nowhere near Munchkinland when Dorothy arrives.

The stage musical moves along so briskly that there's no time to worry about questions like this. The movie gets so granular about the detail, it leaves only time to ponder such peculiarities.

Only when the movie gets to its climactic number, the titular For Good, are both Erivo and Grande-Butera really given the opportunity to shine — and they take it. Even if Chu's framing favors far too many close ups and too much cutting, these two performers show us why they're so right for the roles, and for just a minute have us really believing in the characters, the deep emotion of an objectively moving song, and in the relationship that should be the centerpiece of both movies.

By that point, it's been a long time coming. A very long time. But for those few minutes, Wicked: For Good, thanks to its stars, delivers real movie magic — the kind we came for, and the kind Wicked deserved to have much, much more of.

Viewed November 23, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1610

"Bugonia"

☆☆☆☆☆

A word of warning for those about to watch Bugonia: Afterward, expect to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of inquiry about the latest Yorgos Lanthimos movie, which is, in every sense of the word, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

He is the director who made Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, among others, all of which are movies that developed fervent admirers and bemused detractors in equal measure, and Bugonia is like those movies only — and here's the real kicker — more so.

While I'd never advise doing too much research into a movie before seeing it, in the case of Bugonia even the most spoiler-filled description of the movie is going to be insufficient to prepare you for the experience of watching it, which is glorious, bewildering, offensive, hilarious, gory, off-putting and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same scene. It's also blessed with one of the best scores of the year, by Jerskin Fendrix, and reading about the creation of the music is like finding a rabbit hole that branches off into another rabbit hole that leads to its own set of rabbit holes.

There is a simple way to explain the basic plot of Bugonia: A pair of conspiracy theorists kidnap a wealthy CEO believing her to be an alien who wants to destroy Earth. Astonishingly, this is not the first time that story has been told on film. Bugonia (caution: this is the first step into the hole) is based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet. Lanthimos may seem the ideal director for Bugonia, but he wasn't originally going to make the film — the original director, Jang Joon-hwan, was going to remake it, but bowed out, in what may be one of the most fortuitous moments in moviemaking history.

Emma Stone plays the CEO, a woman named Michelle Fuller, who is one of the world's worst practitioners of faux empathy. Jesse Plemons, in his best screen performance to date, is Teddy, a man who has spent far too much time on the Internet, which is ironic because that's what watching Bugonia makes you do. He doesn't just believe Fuller is an alien emissary from Andromeda, he has staked his entire identity on it. He's also convinced his autistic cousin Don (an astonishing Aidan Delbis), and together they redefine the idea of focused commitment, as the CEO might say.

To try to explain anything more about Bugonia would largely be impossible, except that it's worth noting that the movie opens on a closeup of a honeybee, and Teddy is an amateur apiarist. He knows how to keep things. He believes it is his mission.

Remember, please, that this is a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, which means that a description of the plot is only an approximation of the experience. As the film progresses, it muddies and confuses — with all intention — what it's trying to say, and hides its true intentions, until we're as mixed up as Don professes to be. Who are we supposed to be siding with here? Is the film really making the bold, angry, unexpected pronouncements that it seems to be making, or is that all for show?

Lanthimos is a master at bringing the audience along on stories that by all accounts should be unwatchable. (More than a few people claim they are unwatchable, though I'm not among those.) The things Lanthimos shows us, the things he gets us willing to believe, are often outrageous and offensive to delicate sensibilities. Bugonia goes even farther than he's gone before, in many respects, and Stone, Plemons and Delbis are right there with him, doing things that should, and do, shock us, even while they get us to think, laugh and avert our eyes at things that other, less daring directors wouldn't even think about putting up there on the screen.

When it's over, you'll want to know what it all means. Just be careful in that rabbit hole. It's a long, long way down.

Viewed November 18, 2025 — AMC Century City

1935

"Die My Love"

☆☆☆½

Some people will argue (its director, Lynne Ramsay, says wrongly) that Die My Love is about post-partum depression. I agree with Ramsay, but that begs the question: what is it about? And few people who see Die My Love are likely to agree on an answer, if post-partum depression really is off the table.

First and foremost, I'd argue that it's about a very specific mood, the dangerous one that comes from something much deeper than melancholia and maybe even transcends depression. It's about despair and hopelessness, and the unexpected ways that life, in all its weird beauty and expressiveness, can slice through that heaviness but never relieve it.

It's also, on a more complex level, about moviemaking itself, and the way images and sounds, dialogue and performance can all co-exist and never quite tell a cohesive story yet also never fail to tell a story, anyway. In that regard, it's a little like watching an anguished, existential, homebound 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's in love with moviemaking, the way Ingmar Bergman was, and like his films (especially Persona and Cries and Whispers) it's possible it will leave you scratching your head, but still feeling ... something. But what? Hard to tell.

Die My Love, as the title suggests, is probably not going to leave you buoyant, and yet it's filled with such indescribably good things that if you like movies it will be hard not to feel at least a little energized. To begin with, there are the central performances — and not just Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a woman whose mind is coming undone, and whose breakdown may or may not be related to her new motherhood. Her husband Jackson is played by Robert Pattinson, who is powerful as a man who does not understand the person he married, or, worse, the person that marriage has made him become.

Also delivering interesting, worthy performances here are Lakeith Stanfield as a man whose sexuality is so alluring it seems unreal (and may be); Sissy Spacek as Grace's mother-in-law, who wants to be supportive but understands fractured reality more than she lets on; and, briefly but memorably, Nick Nolte as Jackson's father, who is both sick and haunted by his own demons.

For much of its running time, Die My Love is a series of images rather than a coherent story. If the book was written as fractured internal monologue, the film takes on that busy, anguished mind through images that are sometimes hard, occasionally brutal, to parse. When the story does kick in, it's minimal, which is only sometimes a problem because the film's images are so daring and brave, brought to life by a cast that is willing to do remarkable things to make us believe in these people.

Lawrence stands at the center, raw and ... what? Frightened? Exasperated? Exhausted? Hopeless? Yes, all of those things, but Die My Love is wise not to try to name them. The novel on which it's based was told in first-person form and made Grace its focus; in the film, the story is no doubt hers, but the way her behavior affects others and the way the others affect her behavior become important factors. Grace does some terrible things in Die My Love. (Fair warning for those who are sensitive: some of them involve animals.) Most of the things she does are incomprehensible.

But what Ramsay seems to want to convey, and does with unnerving flair, is that life is often incomprehensible. The things people do often make no sense. Her goal here seems less to be one of explanation than lyrical, sometimes beautiful, often empathetic observation, but always from a distance, always with remove — a remove that may make the film feel cold and inaccessible, though in fairness that's also the way Grace feels most of the time.

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Note: Days after watching Die My Love, I added a half-star to my rating. The film remains challenging and even problematic, but few movies have stuck with me as persistently or convincingly. It's a tough film to shake, and that deserves a higher rating.

Viewed November 19, 2025 — AMC Topanga

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